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Every one of the finest playwrights push the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and often emotional theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he frequently explored in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, morals, class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly declared insane and imprisoned in a cell with an real madman who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a